"Masters of our time and our destiny. For a Port Authority of Lanzarote"

October 19 2015 (22:48 WEST)

The sea has fed the people of Lanzarote for centuries. The man of Lanzarote has always looked to the sea as a source of life and wealth. Sailors returned through the port with fish, materials, ideas and even fresh water... the sea has always been a gateway to life.

Arrecife is a natural port that became the capital due to intense commercial activity and was consolidated with the development of the fishing industry. It came to have up to six canneries and the largest sardine fleet in Europe. Commercial relations with the African coast were intense and profitable, but a series of circumstances ended up suffocating these activities and a great potential that today can be reactivated and give rise to new sources of employment.

The port has been and is strategic for the economic development of Lanzarote, for the quality of life and for its inhabitants. However, we have left this vital infrastructure in the hands of others. The decision-making bodies of the port of Arrecife are on the island of Gran Canaria. The people who decide on our port live there, have interests and companies there and defend with greater zeal another larger port, that of La Luz, which engulfs that of Arrecife.

Right now it is a captive port, dependent on a larger installation, contaminated in its behaviors by provincial centralism. Its commercial strategy, its job-creating potential, its sustainable development, its future, are in the hands and heads of people who do not know or care about the social reality of the island.

We are of age, the time has come for the Port to be managed from Lanzarote, directly with Puertos del Estado, without interested intermediaries, to jointly draw up a port commercial strategy for all of the Canary Islands, not just for the large ports.

We have enormous possibilities to develop activities in employment-multiplying sectors that could cushion an unemployment rate that Tourism will never absorb, because NOT EVERYONE FITS IN TOURISM. The port has the potential to generate new sources of employment linked to the sea: underwater work, naval repairs, repairs of electronic and navigation equipment, recreational and sports boating, services linked to maritime transport, logistics on land and at sea, provisioning, commercial services, riverbank carpentry, possibility of promoting green economy projects, alternative energies, improved connectivity that allows greater economic diversification, and a development of the free zone that gives rise to new transforming industries.

We have a Maritime Fisheries Institute capable of training these new professionals who will be in demand. A professional reference center in the Canary Islands that has the exclusive advantage of being located in the heart of the Port.

We have port facilities with sufficient scope to have our own Port Authority, with volume and results that place us, from the outset, in the middle zone of the ranking of port authorities in the State, according to data from the Port Authority of Las Palmas itself.

We have a versatile and agile port that with better commercial management would be able to attract moderate traffic but more than enough for our capacity.

We are the most desired Canary Island by cruise passengers, but we have lost the first place we held until 2008, for the benefit of the Port of La Luz, by decision of that port council in which there is hardly any representation from Lanzarote. It has slipped out of our hands, just as fishing has slipped out of our hands and just as so many other opportunities that we need for the island and its inhabitants are slipping out of our hands.

The potential is so great and the path so easy to travel, that it is completely inevitable that it will happen. In all likelihood, the creation of a Port Authority of Lanzarote is a matter of time, but 44 years should weigh enough not to let one more pass. From 1971 to the present, the demand has been postponed on numerous occasions, but this time it is final and we need the whole of society to know what the Port means for their daily and vital reality. Because everything or almost everything we consume and use enters through the port.

We need social involvement in this issue that is not for businessmen or politicians, but for each and every one of the citizens who inhabit this island because the Port is an issue that affects everyone.

We have already done it previously and always with positive and beneficial results that generate not only economic activity but also social return. Lanzarote has already separated from provincial tutelage in organizations such as the tourism board, bar associations, social graduates or architects and business organizations such as the Confederation and the Chamber of Commerce.

We have to get rid of that inferiority complex instilled for years by provincial paternalism because the people of Lanzarote know how to take care of our resources very well. There is the example of Sustainable Tourism where no one disputes our leadership in being the island of reference in Spain.

No one is going to take care of our things if we don't and no one, moreover, is going to do it as well as ourselves. We must be masters of our time and our destiny.

 

By José Torres Fuentes, President of the Chamber of Commerce of Lanzarote

Most read